Long Road to Mercy (Atlee Pine, #1)(50)

After finishing the salad, Pine set the dining room table, then put the bowl of greens on the table.

Blum squeezed a sliced lemon over the cooked chicken cutlets and plated them over beds of arugula. She took the rolls out of the oven and put them in a basket that she had lined with a cloth napkin.

“I see your friend has a wine chiller,” said Blum, pointing to the appliance under the kitchen counter. “I’m more of a red person, but a Chardonnay or even better a Pinot Grigio would go well with the chicken. You want to check while I carry the plates and rolls in?”

A minute later Pine came in carrying an uncorked bottle of Pinot and a wineglass in one hand, and a Fat Tire Belgian ale in the other.

“My idea of a nice white,” said Pine, holding up the beer.

She poured the wine into the glass and set it in front of Blum before taking her seat.

Blum clinked her wineglass against Pine’s bottle of beer.

They ate in silence until Pine said, “This is really good.”

“I can show you how to make it.”

Pine didn’t respond to this at first. “You know, that might be nice. I’m, uh, I’m not that much of a cook.”

“Simple is best. And fresh ingredients.”

“Right. So, um, maybe you can teach me a few dishes.” She glanced away and took a quick swig of her beer.

Blum looked at Pine closely. “For Sam Kettler?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, come on, Agent Pine. I’m too old to be manipulated.”

Pine smiled. “Okay, I do like him. We seemed to connect.”

“Well, thank God, there’s no law against that. You said he likes you, and after what you told me, I agree. And whether you think it’s complicated or not, I think you should see him when we get back.”

“If we get back,” said Pine, turning serious once more.

“I stand corrected. So what’s our next step?”

Pine put her fork and knife down and picked up her beer. “His brother gave me Ben Priest’s home address. It’s in Old Town Alexandria. I would expect the place is being watched, so we’re going to watch the watchers and do some recon at the same time.”

“Okay.”

“Then there’s Ed Priest’s family. I need to contact them without anyone knowing.”

“Aren’t they still in protective custody?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t get them into an actual safe house. But I had uniformed FBI looking after them. That might have been pulled after the call Dobbs got from the DD.”

“And then we have the men in the chopper who took away the Priest brothers. Any idea who they might be?”

“I can make some deductions.”

Blum took a sip of her wine and looked across the table thoughtfully at her boss. “What are they? And, more importantly, what are they based on?”

“I recognized the type of chopper.”

“What was it?”

“A UH-72A Lakota. I’ve actually ridden on them.”

“Who uses it?”

“Mostly, the United States Army.”





Chapter

27



KURT FERRIS had also left his two-year-old Kia Soul for Pine to use. She knew he’d owned a decked-out Dodge Ram pickup with double rear wheels before coming to DC from the wilds of Fort Bragg, Texas. However, he’d found the Ram was too big to drive and park in the traffic-and space-challenged Ballston area, so he’d traded it in for the Kia. Pine knew the man wasn’t happy about it, because he’d told her he wasn’t. He said he felt like a wimp on wheels.

She was parked at the curb about five townhomes down from Ben Priest’s nineteenth-century row house on Lee Street in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. It was an upscale, historic area located along the Potomac River.

She’d Googled real estate in the area and had calculated that Priest’s home was worth north of two million.

She wondered what sort of work he had done to afford that sort of residence.

Like allowing a man to take his place on a mule ride down to the floor of the Grand Canyon and then disappear? Priest had mentioned “laundering” people, but she hadn’t believed him. Yet maybe she needed to think about that some more.

Priest had told her that he’d worked for American intelligence before hanging out his own shingle. If Pine could have used normal Bureau resources, she might have been able to do a far deeper dig on the man, finding out perhaps what agency he worked at, and what sort of work he did there. Yet Pine was doing something she should not be doing, so those official resources were not available.

She had watched the home for a while, and was convinced that Priest’s home was not under surveillance by anyone else.

This gave Pine an opening.

She had seen the woman before when she had gone out earlier. She lived in the row house next to Priest. In fact, the homes were attached. Pine had checked the backs of the houses. The backyards were separated only by a low-level fence. There might have been some interaction there.

The woman looked to be in her sixties, with thinning white hair styled in a way that indicated she had money and wasn’t adverse to pampering herself. This was also shown by her designer clothes and shoes and sunglasses. She was also tanned and fit, and she carried herself with the air of someone who had had the pleasure of giving orders rather than following them. This had been confirmed by what Pine assumed was the woman’s uniformed maid or housekeeper, who had been handed a cluster of bags from a late model burgundy Jag convertible parked in front of the woman’s house. The woman had then carried them inside.